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Metrics to Evaluate a Question Answering System

Blog post from deepset

Post Details
Company
Date Published
Author
Isabelle Nguyen
Word Count
1,256
Company Posts That Month
5
Language
English
Hacker News Points
-
Post removed?
No
Summary

To reliably evaluate the quality of a question answering (QA) system, it's essential to use quantifiable metrics coupled with a labeled evaluation dataset. This allows for informed assessments of the system's quality, comparison of different models, and identification of underperforming components. The QA system consists of a retriever and reader model chained together in a pipeline object, where the retriever chooses documents from a database based on a query, and the reader extracts the correct answer from those documents. Evaluation datasets should be manually annotated with correct answers, and there are two evaluation modes: open domain (single document QA) and closed domain (multiple document QA). Metrics such as recall, mean reciprocal rank, exact match, F1 score, accuracy, and semantic answer similarity can be used to evaluate the retriever and reader models individually or in combination. These metrics provide insight into the system's performance, helping developers optimize their pipeline for better results.

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